211–220 of 580 posts
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Another point is that $500k is not in the 1% everywhere. In the Bay Area, it wouldn’t even put you at the top 5%. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/01/upshot/are-yo...
But the Bay Area's high prices are driven by scarcity + demand, not intrinsic cost. So if everyone had a higher tax burden, I'd expect costs to come down.
Every time someone tries to make a tax targeting the ultra rich, it ends up hurting the moderately wealthy instead. Every. Single. Time. The worse tax situation is always the person who makes 500k in a good year, or sells a house they held for 25 years which went up a bunch in value. I suspect this is a significant factor in social mobility. Our tax system is punitive to people who try to leave the working class.
I agree with your general point, but your specific example of selling highly appreciated real estate is a poor one, since you incur no tax when selling your primary residence (up to something like $500k gain - over your cost basis which includes any capital improvement you made to the property) as long as you lived there for two of the last five years. It’s a huge tax advantage for homeowners. One could argue that it…
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Same thing, the only way to eliminating wealth disparity is to eliminate wealth. The Authoritarian Left that goes on and on about eliminating wealth disparity has no interest in lifting everyone up to be wealthy, not they want to seize the wealth and drag anyone down they deem is "too wealthy" Which is ironically always someone more wealthy than the person advocating for wealth redistribution, for example Bernie Sand…
You know being a millionaire today has a massively different meaning than 20 years ago.
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They are not private individuals. They are individuals that are of public interest (much like celebrities) and hold significant sway over communities (much like public officials). This is pretty standard legal precedent.
So privacy is only for those that aren't celebrities? Do you have some barometer for what makes a "celebrity"? Blue check mark? Right to privacy is a human right. Do you agree? If so, are there classes of human rights that aren't applicable to some groups of individuals?
On the other, you have freedom of the press clearly outlined in the first amendment. There is no perfect answer and it will be subject to some debate. But in this particular instance, precedence has made it clear that people of significant stature (and that could mean a blue check is a signal of that in court!) have less of a right to privacy when weighed against the first amendment.
In Finland, everyone's taxable income is a matter of public record. One theoretical benefit of such a policy is that it eliminates information asymmetries between workers and employers in wage bargaining.
That's an interesting approach. I have a couple questions out of curiosity.
Does that include their "offshore" income? By that, I mean income earned outside of the country, not necessarily hidden.
Also, what is income? If there is a billionaire investor and he loses $10 million, do you see that as well?
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I agree with your general point, but your specific example of selling highly appreciated real estate is a poor one, since you incur no tax when selling your primary residence (up to something like $500k gain - over your cost basis which includes any capital improvement you made to the property) as long as you lived there for two of the last five years. It’s a huge tax advantage for homeowners. One could argue that it…
When a person moves house, the proceeds from the sale of the old house are used to buy the new house. If someone has lived in an area for a long time, wants to move across the street to an otherwise identical house with the same value, why should they be taxed for that move but not for simply living in the first house?
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The solution to this is to eliminate wealth disparity.
Maybe. But how? I think that, if you could somehow collect all the wealth and redistribute it equally, within a few years we would see disparity reappear. Some folks are better at accumulating wealth than others. It seems to me that you would have to keep reallocating wealth. And many would then ask, what's the motive for generating wealth if it's just going to be taken away from you?
The same motivation that drives some folks to study e.g. philosophy, even though it's perfectly well known that this will never make you rich: Because they like it.
You don't just e.g. found a company for the sake of money - you also do it because it allows you to do things on your own terms, it gives you prestige, it gives you the satisfaction of being 'successful'. In todays day and age, this is usually equivalent with 'generating wealth', but I'm a firm believer that this does not necessarily have to be the case.
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Sure, but it’s likely that a state actor had this information too. Any credible attempt at deception would use as much corroboratable data as possible.
I find it unlikely that even a state actor would have access to literally all the same private data that ProPublica has acquired over the years, and that they'd know what data ProPublica has and what can be safely manipulated.
I'm not sure I agree with taxing the "wealth", instead of income. Sure, on paper, Buffett's wealth went up by $23B; but these are just imaginary numbers based on the whims of the market. The tax should be on what amount of money actually flowed into his bank account.